Memoirs and Cigarettes
by Scribbler
Summary: [one shot] Life was so crazy and then so average so quickly, it left everyone spinning. Then Anzu moved, and it's difficult to cope a thousand miles from those you love. [AnzuRaphael]


**Disclaimer: **Nobody you even _think_ you recognise is mine.

**A/N:** I have no explanation and make no apology. But if you're going to throw things, make sure they aren't the pointy kind.

**Continuity: **Post-end of series. No real spoilers, though.

**Feedback: **Always.

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_**Memoirs and Cigarettes **_

© Scribbler, August 2006.

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_High up above or down below,  
When you're too in love to let it go;  
But if you never try you'll never know  
Just what you're worth._

-- From _Fix You _by Coldplay.

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He would wait for her outside the stage door after everyone else was gone, sometimes smoking, sometimes not. He always smelled of stale unfiltered cigarettes, and she short of liked that because it made him seem more dangerous, and it was easier to justify things that way. He was danger and she wanted danger. She _missed_ it – though not the life-or-death part, just the zinging-veins, adrenaline-rush, this-could-be-it-so-make-the-most-of-what-you've-got vibrancy. Danger sharpened you so you appreciated more. He was spice. He was someone _Yami _respected.

He didn't mind going to cafes and restaurants with her, though he carried with him a careless air that made waiters quail and society people stare in that determinedly passive way. He wasn't rich – not without Dartz to pick up the tab – but he acted like rich people did. He knew how to flip open a menu and scan a page without really seeing it. He knew how to snap his fingers and summon a concierge. He knew which fork to use.

He knew how to walk into a dive bar and have every brass-knuckled punk make way for him.

He never smiled at her, never gave her a kind word, but he showed her consideration and she clung to that. With him, she didn't have to pretend she was normal. With him, she didn't have to be pretty and flighty and vacant like the other girls in her troupe. He'd seen her in the desert. She'd sat across from his soulless body. He'd stolen Yuugi from her, and for so long she'd hated him for that – couldn't forgive, couldn't forget, couldn't stop herself picking the scab off and bringing up the subject when she ran across him in a New York subway carriage. Couldn't stop herself smacking him with her clutch purse and running onto a platform five blocks too early.

He followed her that time, maintaining a safe distance but watching every step until she shut the door to her building behind her. Shutting him out, she thought. Keeping the wolf from her door. She couldn't afford a place with a doorman, but thick chains and deadbolts were nearly as good. She could feel his eyes burning a hole in her back, but she ignored him to rush upstairs. Her fingers shook as she jabbed the buttons on the phone, tolls be damned, and called Japan just to hear Yuugi's sleepy voice.

Yuugi was puzzled to hear from her so soon after her last call (international rates were extortionate, after all), and immediately started to fret that something was wrong, which only made her want to cry and smile and rage, all at the same time. Japan was so far _away. _Nothing was wrong, she told him firmly. Nothing at all.

Nothing except psycho ex-enemies following her home.

She didn't realise until much later that he was making sure nobody in her – admittedly rough – neighbourhood attacked her between the station and her building.

She smacked him again when he turned up at rehearsal. She never did find out who let him in, or why he was there. She didn't give him time to explain himself, just acted on emotion – again. Jounouchi used to comment on that: There she goes, off like a firecracker to defend her friends, wonder who's gonna get burned this time. She put no consideration into her actions, just flowed from one move to the next, like when she was little in dance class, and Miss Odori would make them invent a dance to a song they'd never heard before.

She smacked him again when he turned up at rehearsal. She never did find out who let him in, or why he was there. She didn't give him time to explain himself, just acted on emotion – again. He'd hurt Yami. He'd hurt Yuugi. He'd hurt _her_. Because of him, because of what he'd done in the desert, she'd felt so useless and pathetic and weak and … _normal_. Normal people couldn't do _anything_.You had to be special to survive.

That time he caught her wrist before her hand could make contact with his face, and they spent a loaded moment glaring at each other in the dim light of the theatre. A piano plinked in the background. Jessie (wavy dark hair, watery eyes and a permanently abandoned expression) was having trouble with the _pas des deux_ again, and Henri (real name Norman, flamboyantly gay, row of stitches on his thigh where a gang of drunks once got hold of him) was helping her practice while everybody took five. They were so busy watching Jessie stumble they ignored the drama on the back row.

Yet where her glare was impassioned, just like everything she did, his was cool and assessing. He was unfathomable.

He was always unfathomable, even in glorious sunshine in the middle of Central Park. Shadows clung to the brutal tilt of his eyebrows, making him appear dark and brooding even when he was just deciding where to go for lunch. People stared at him. They were _afraid _of him – of the look of him, of what his studded leather coat and vicious haircut portended. They forgot that he was human, that he did domestic things like buy petrol, catch colds and recycle beer cans. He was part of The Other – the nameless wardrobe thing you were afraid of as a kid, the feeling of being watched, the sense that you're being followed down a lonely alley late at night.

He regarded them all with trained indifference – ever her. Only when she knew him better did she learn what that look concealed; of the hot anger beneath, the resentment boiling under his skin like a thousand writhing minnows.

Because he was proud. When he tilted his chin, it wasn't with unconcern, but defiance at these people who would fear him without knowing _what he was_. He was honour and rage and triumph. He was solitude and invention and unyielding, biting regret. He was flesh and blood and bone – piss and shit and muscle. He was mortal. He was flawed. He was _human_.

She recognised some of these things because she'd seen them before. He reminded her of the last few years in Domino, before Yami left and she moved and they all sank into hollow normalcy.

Her dreams weren't as fulfilling as they might once have been. New York, New York, it's a hell of a down; it's all trash and traffic in this crummy old town. She cut through the morass of everyday life, scaring producers with her lived-in manner and difficult blue eyes. Here, there was no Yuugi to balance her out. Here, she had no Jounouchi or Honda to pick on. The troupe was just as dumb, but they needed to be mollycoddled if she was to keep her place. She couldn't afford to vent her stewpot emotions, or share her outrageous memories, or miss Yami and revel in the fact that they'd all _survived_, so her feelings just simmered, and simmered, and simmered.

Except with him, because she hated him. He was a perfect target. She hated him for hurting her. That's what she told herself. In truth she was just resentful that life had been so crazy and then so average so quickly, and he represented what she'd lost in a way she could use to exorcise her horror at what life had in store for her now.

There would be no more magic for her.

Painful to think. Even more painful to live.

He took her venting with a slightly warmer than frigid tolerance, but he kept coming back. That was the kicker. He kept coming back to her, even though she made it plain she hated him. Part pf her was pleased – here was an necessary target making itself _convenient_ for her. The rest of her wavered between indignation and uneasiness. The past rose up in her mind like a bog spitting out a body, years after absorbing it, whole and unmarked as the day it died.

She never hit him again, and he never so much as hinted at raising a hand to her. He never brought out his cards, either. For all she knew he'd burned them and thrown the equipment Dartz gave him into the sea.

He'd been all over the world since that time. Sometimes she wondered which country held his cast-offs; then she decided she'd rather not know. When she let him, he didn't talk about the intervening time much, but what he did say was laden with a sense of _searching_. Moreover, it was full of things unfound. When she ran out of insults, she told him about Egypt, about Atem and the Millennium Items. He nodded as if he'd suspected something like that all along.

She used to quite like herself until Yami. Then doubt crept in, as he evaded her affections, throwing her off-balance in his unwillingness to admit to more than friendship. Now she felt almost the same as she did then, seeing herself as she imagined he saw her; and oh, was she unattractive? She appeared alternately older and younger than she was – too jaded and too naïve. She had spinach between her teeth. She wore too much mascara for the size of her eyes. She didn't look like a serious person. She didn't act sophisticated, as a professional dancer in New York should.

Her appearance was softened only because she made an effort with it. She wore wedges instead of stilettos. She avoided carbs and kept her salt intake low. She did a hundred sit-ups every night. She was prepared to risk losing the enamel on her teeth by brushing with 'American' tooth whitener. She followed fashion, but knew her limits. When he looked at her, she imagined him assessing her with those cool blue-grey eyes, sizing her up compared to everyone else because her intense, impotent anger blocked out her fear of him.

_His _profile was always striking no matter what light he was in. He was all heavy, concentrated brow and long, straight nose, with a jawline that seemed to invite her fingers to check for stubble. Her heart, although not quite broken, had been bounced off the ground somewhat carelessly. When she saw girls in short skirts watching him over giant cappuccino cups, she couldn't deny that he was noticeable. Walking alongside him was like standing in the lee of a mountain – big, solid, disdainful and full of memories as stone.

Sometimes he murmured into her hair about his family, and she recalled Yuugi's garbled explanations of sinking ships and unwelcome survival. Sometimes he said nothing at all, and she was fine about that, too. She was a big girl now. He was dangerous. He was independent. As with Yami, she couldn't expect him to confide totally in her. He didn't lie to her, at least. He didn't make promises they both knew he wouldn't keep – like friends forever, never leave, never forget you, never walk away without turning back one last time.

And he was a link to the life and people she desperately yearned to recapture.

He was danger. He was spice. He was someone Yamirespected. No, Atem…

She missed it all desperately.

If she were making a mistake, then she'd pay for it later. For now, she was content to inhale his stale cigarette smell as he pressed her against the wall by the stage door and made her forget that she was just a normal girl now.

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fin.

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End file.
